Alexander Manu Keynote: Starting From Scratch


Join Industrial Design Tenured Professor Alexander Manu at the Innovation Ignites! OCIC AGM & Symposium, a one-day event that seeks to bring together 100 leaders and change agents to imagine new possibilities for development innovation. 
 

 
DateFriday, June 16, 2017 - 8:30am to 9:45pm

Website

http://www.ocic.on.ca/agm2017

Location

Center for Social Innovation. 192 Spadina Avenue, Toronto. ON *This venue is wheelchair accessible

Join Industrial Design Tenured Professor Alexander Manu at the Innovation Ignites! OCIC AGM & Symposium, a one-day event that seeks to bring together 100 leaders and change agents to imagine new possibilities for development innovation. 

11:30 am - 12:45 pm
Alexander Manu
Starting from Scratch

Provocative author, speaker and leading practitioner in the field of strategic foresight Alexander Manu, surveys the fast changing context for incumbent organizations in all market spaces where individuals are now empowered and now seek engagement with platforms that allow them to leave a mark, and to participate in the community of others.

Empowered people have discovered themselves as social beings, with agency to shape the world by all means available, affecting the experience of life itself. Empowered participation is motivating people to set new goals for engaging with life, to discover and create new experiences, to seek meaning and pleasure in actions conditioned only by the self desire to play in the social realm. This is the major provocation of the future, the transformation of all relationships, and how it will affect society, business, culture and consumption models.

As technology changes the structure of our life, it also changes the frameworks on which our experiences are built. To be providers of new meaning in this new framework, organizations must change their narrative and redefine their role within the story of each user; in other words, starting from scratch. Starting from scratch means drawing a clean line and imagining everything as it should be, not as an improvement of what is. The implication of this action does not mean that we forget where we come from, but it means that we create new roots, and ones not encumbered by the preexisting structures of our current social constructs, organization or habits. Having new roots implies effectiveness and efficiency, implies sustainability, as we have the opportunity to construct the structure in the right way from the beginning.

We are not fixing the old; we are maximizing the present. Starting from scratch permits us the freedom to design organizations or social structures that fit the place where they perform and take advantage of all the ingredients surrounding them. Starting from scratch is a challenge to one’s ability to create new images of self, constructing a new world from the inside out, as both a participant as well as a creature of it. These new images, and the artefacts they create in turn, are reflections of new life priorities, and the heights of existence we want to achieve through the new story. A new and inspiring ethos. The future as ethos has little to do with technology; it has only to do with what we want of ourselves.

See the full agenda here.

DateFriday, June 16, 2017 - 8:30am to 9:45pm

Website

http://www.ocic.on.ca/agm2017

Location

Center for Social Innovation. 192 Spadina Avenue, Toronto. ON *This venue is wheelchair accessible

Friday, June 16, 2017 - 8:30am to 9:45pm

Join Industrial Design Tenured Professor Alexander Manu at the Innovation Ignites! OCIC AGM & Symposium, a one-day event that seeks to bring together 100 leaders and change agents to imagine new possibilities for development innovation. 

11:30 am - 12:45 pm
Alexander Manu
Starting from Scratch

Provocative author, speaker and leading practitioner in the field of strategic foresight Alexander Manu, surveys the fast changing context for incumbent organizations in all market spaces where individuals are now empowered and now seek engagement with platforms that allow them to leave a mark, and to participate in the community of others.

Empowered people have discovered themselves as social beings, with agency to shape the world by all means available, affecting the experience of life itself. Empowered participation is motivating people to set new goals for engaging with life, to discover and create new experiences, to seek meaning and pleasure in actions conditioned only by the self desire to play in the social realm. This is the major provocation of the future, the transformation of all relationships, and how it will affect society, business, culture and consumption models.

As technology changes the structure of our life, it also changes the frameworks on which our experiences are built. To be providers of new meaning in this new framework, organizations must change their narrative and redefine their role within the story of each user; in other words, starting from scratch. Starting from scratch means drawing a clean line and imagining everything as it should be, not as an improvement of what is. The implication of this action does not mean that we forget where we come from, but it means that we create new roots, and ones not encumbered by the preexisting structures of our current social constructs, organization or habits. Having new roots implies effectiveness and efficiency, implies sustainability, as we have the opportunity to construct the structure in the right way from the beginning.

We are not fixing the old; we are maximizing the present. Starting from scratch permits us the freedom to design organizations or social structures that fit the place where they perform and take advantage of all the ingredients surrounding them. Starting from scratch is a challenge to one’s ability to create new images of self, constructing a new world from the inside out, as both a participant as well as a creature of it. These new images, and the artefacts they create in turn, are reflections of new life priorities, and the heights of existence we want to achieve through the new story. A new and inspiring ethos. The future as ethos has little to do with technology; it has only to do with what we want of ourselves.

See the full agenda here.

Venue & Address: 
Center for Social Innovation. 192 Spadina Avenue, Toronto. ON *This venue is wheelchair accessible
Website: 
http://www.ocic.on.ca/agm2017
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